Temperatures Saturday pushed easily into the 30s under bright sunny skies, so it wasn’t going to be a surprise to anybody that there would be plenty of anglers on the ice.

And then a person drove by the Old Mill Restaurant and the Cedar River dam, and there was more than just fishing going on. There was also a good cause — a cause that’s quietly enjoyed its seventh year.

The Seventh Annual Hormel/Dry Sausage Ice Fishing Contest isn’t the most well-known contest, according to organizers Duane Smith, Jim Nelson and Mark Turvey, but by sheer numbers alone it’s popular enough. One hundred and thirty anglers were signed up for this year’s contest at the $10 entry fee. All that money raised will go to the Hormel Institute and toward finding a cure for cancer.

The event itself is somewhat of a marvel. Not so much because the event is held, but how effortlessly it seems to come together.

Seven years ago the contest started nameless with only 10 people, with an agreement that at $5 per person, the money would go to whomever caught the biggest fish.

Now it’s a humble, yet sizable effort to get on the ice and have some fun while helping a beneficial cause at the same time.

And it’s how organizers want to keep it. Huddled within the banks of the Cedar, the anglers are crowded amongst fish houses and around holes. The 130 seems like a good number both because any bigger, and it gets hard to manage. In addition, once there are more than 150 participants, additional permits have to be requested from the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources.

So with the number of anglers at a comfortable sum, organizers are content with everything around them. And it works. So good in fact that it doesn’t take much for them to start looking ahead.

“We start talking about it way before the contest,”Nelson said. “Who knows how long this will go.”

Fishing began at around 9 a.m., with organizers coming out before to drill the holes and offer bait. Bait is made available to the anglers and food, offered at a meeting at the Windrift afterwards, is donated by Hormel in the form of pulled pork. There is also a raffle and door prizes donated by more than 40 businesses are handed out at that time.

Organizers are quick to point out the impact of the local businesses especially in the face of the economic downfall.

“The businesses deserve a lot of credit for what it is,”Nelson said. “We got more than last year.”

“You walk into these businesses and ask for something and when you walk out it’s just a feeling of victory,”Smith said.

It’s easy enough to understand. At one point, Nelson explains that in reality there isn’t much caught at this point of the Cedar.

“You catch a northern every…,”Nelson explains before his attention is drawn to loud cheering not far away. Before long, Larry Mikkelson walks up to the weigh station with his 23 and a quarter inch northern.

“We just have a ball doing this,”Smith said.